On 10 January 2000, the Weekly Standard declared that Winston Churchill was ‘Man of the Century’. This view is the consensus among the neocons. Charles Krauthammer, the Canadian émigré pundit, has written, ‘After having single-handedly saved Western civilisation from Nazi barbarism — Churchill was, of course, not sufficient in bringing victory, but he was uniquely necessary — he then immediately rose to warn prophetically against its sister barbarism, Soviet communism.’ Krauthammer’s fellow Canadian émigré, David Frum, denounced Bill Clinton for declaring that Franklin Roosevelt was the ‘Man of the Century’. According to Frum, who was still a subject of Her Majesty when he was hired as a speechwriter by George W. Bush’s White House, ‘FDR has to be found wanting. Of the three great killers of this century, one (Mao) was aided by Communist sympathisers within the Roosevelt administration ...Another (Stalin) benefited from Roosevelt’s almost wilful naiveté about the Soviet Union ...Roosevelt’s record even on the third killer, Hitler, is spotty. Roosevelt recognised Hitler’s danger early, but he hesitated to jeopardise his hopes for an unprecedented third term by riling isolationist opinion...’. Reading Krauthammer and Frum, you have to wonder whether Winston Churchill might not have ‘single-handedly’ won the second world war and saved civilisation even sooner, if he had not been handicapped by his alliance with the United States
Only a Canadian like Frum could claim that FDR was an appeaser, compared with Churchill. It was Churchill who, in 1937, wrote in his book Great Contemporaries, ‘One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.’ Churchill’s posthumous reputation as an uncompromising anti-Soviet hardliner is another neocon myth. True, Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech of 1946 was seen as too strident by the Truman administration and much of the American public. But during the war it was Churchill, not FDR, who haggled with Stalin over ‘percentages’ of postwar influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. And in the mid-Fifties Churchill thought that Eisenhower was too hard on the Soviets and kept pushing the naive idea that a big-power summit could end the Cold War. The neocons never quote Churchill’s statement of 1954, ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.’ The neocon goal of promoting democracy worldwide was shared by FDR and Woodrow Wilson, but not by the Tory Prime Minister who called Gandhi a ‘fakir’ and announced that he would not preside over the dissolution of the British Empire........
Jaffa doesn’t quote Churchill on this subject — possibly because, contrary to his implication, Churchill, unlike today’s American neocons, was an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, who told Asquith in 1910, ‘The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.’ Hitler’s ultimately genocidal programme of ‘racial hygiene’ began with the kind of compulsory sterilisation of ‘the feeble-minded and insane classes’ that Churchill urged on the British government (and which was carried out in many states in the US in the early 20th century)......
As for the Israeli connection — a familiar feature of neocon ideology — Churchill, a lifelong supporter of Zionism, was a social Darwinist who preferred Jews to Arabs. On one occasion he wrote of the legitimacy of displacing ‘the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race, has come in and taken their place.’ Churchill’s Zionism coexisted with a fear that the Jews, deprived of a homeland, might make trouble for the world. In an essay that he wrote for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 entitled ‘Zionism versus Bolshevism’, which the neocons never quote, Churchill ranted that Jews were behind world revolutions everywhere: ‘This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky
, Bela Kun , Rosa Luxemburg , and Emma Goldman ... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.’ If Jews, whom Churchill described as denizens of ‘the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America’, could have their homeland, perhaps they would not — to use Churchill’s words — conspire ‘for the overthrow of civilisation’......
http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec280.html
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